Adapting any well-known property is always going to be a big feat, especially when it comes to video games. It’s one thing to adapt a comic or TV show, it’s another thing to adapt a series of games, which come with a greater degree of self-expression. You can please some fans, but you can’t please all of the fans, as we’ve seen with basically every game-to-TV/film adaptation within the last five years.
Talking to T3, Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan said as such about the upcoming Fallout show. Like many, he came into the series with Fallout 3 all the way back in 2008, which he said consumed roughly a year of his life back in the day. At the time, he would’ve been working on quite a few projects, and he was frank in saying the RPG “almost derailed my entire career.” Fallout fans have been divided on the series for some time (see early reactions to Fallout 76), and Nolan similarly it was impossible for the show to please the whole community.
“It’s a fool’s errand,” he said. “You’ve got to make yourself happy.” with Fallout, he continued, was for everyone to “come into this trying to make the show that you want to make.” Considering previous interviews, it doesn’t sound like this show is going to wildly diverge from those games, but they are going to have their own spin on series staples that’ll likely rankle longtime lovers. Between this and his Batman work, he called it a “rare and unbelievable thing…to take something that you love and get a chance to play in that universe, to create your own version.”
No doubt he’d like for it to be a big multi-season hit like Westworld and Person of Interest, but he sounded honest in saying he was “very happy” with how this series has turned out. We’ll find out whether he should be happy when all eight episodes of Fallout will hit Prime Video on April 11.
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